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Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023)
- danielbln 2y agoI remember this coming across as a little salty, but in hindsight I guess it's prescient.
- DoesntMatter22 2y agoI think there are going to be no real moats here at all since all it takes is access to chips and money to make this happen.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoAnd expertise, which is where you have to pay for quality, something that makes corporations in the West have an existential crisis.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoNot really sure what you’re referring to here. There’s multiple AI companies around who routinely pay expert ICs close to a million a year.
- psb217 2y agoThat's mostly just from cliques of friends hiring each other back and forth, forever ))<>((. OpenAI tries to win by hiring from Anthropic. Anthropic tries to win by hiring from OpenAI. Meta tries to win by hiring from Google. Google tries to win by hiring from Meta. In the end, the net set of engineers and researchers at these companies doesn't change, but median comp among the in-crowd goes up 50%. It's a great gig if you can get it.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoThe reason these kind of cliques form is that experts enjoy talking to and working with other experts. I know multiple people who've been able to enter them from outside, they're not closed circles.
- psb217 2y agoThat's true enough. The problem is that they quickly turn into echo chambers where "is an expert" means "shares our opinions." Once these communities become established (in academia or industry), the appetite for novelty and innovation drops sharply.
- memhole 2y agoHuggingface just released their r1 reproduction. This definitely conforms with my suspicions that LLMs have very little to no margin inherently.
- blibble 2y ago"it's fine, we'll just use AI to replace engineers"
- tetris11 2y agoThe expertise comes first from innovation out of universities, and then refinement out of corporations. Open models aren't going away anytime soon
- moralestapia 2y ago"all it takes is billions of dollars" Well ... there's your moat.
- teddyX 2y agoGoogle is the moat
- malux85 2y agoMoat to what? My Google use has dropped significantly now LLMs are integrated into my IDEs. It’s not zero, but my use has dropped by more than 50% My expectations are changing too, just this weekend I typed into google “is Monday a public holiday in Auckland” And their AI answered me and gave me an enthusiastic and utterly useless paragraph about how some holidays are sometimes on mondays. I thought then, Google is DONE I think they are only surviving on momentum, and because they are so large, they still have momentum, but in the face of automated thought accelerating innovation even an enormous amount of momentum can only carry you so far.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y ago> “is Monday a public holiday in Auckland” People use search engines so differently. It would never occur to me to type anything like this into Google. I would type "New Zealand bank holidays" and expect to find a list (ideally on an official-looking website), and then judge for myself whether Monday was a holiday. Google finds me this as the first result: https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/public-holidays-and-work/public-holidays-and-anniversary-dates/ https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/public-holidays-and-work/pub... What would be the point of introducing any AI into this interaction?
- malux85 2y agoI used to type "New Zealand Bank Holidays" but now my expectations have changed - my expectations of what a search engine can be has evolved because I have tools in other areas of my life that are smarter and getting better, and I expect Google to get smarter and be better. I dont want to query Google the same way as I did in 2015, because it's 2025. The answer I want is NOT a list of public holidays, thats an intermediate. The answer I want is a single word, "Yes" or "No" that's what I want. I can ask an LLM to refactor my codebase and then help me write a GLSL shader to display electron densitry grids and it gets it mostly right. The difficulty of getting such a complex query mostly right is WAY harder than answering my basic /basic/ question about public holidays. Asking "Is Monday a public holiday in Auckland" is a BASIC query I expect google to be able to answer now. I'm an engineer and have been a dev for 20 years, I know that the holiday query involves a realtime lookup of the current date and time, and possibly another query to get the holidays, so it might not be as straight forward as a forward pass through a deep net, but this is GOOGLE we are talking about, what the HELL have they been doing for the last 5 years? The thing that really irked me about the response was that the one it gave me was SO worthless, it gave me a very bad impression about Google instantly because I thought "This thing is dumb as hell", no AI response and just a list of holidays would have been better.
- mainecoder 2y agoThey have data if only there were no managers seeking to impact farm their stats using researchers for promo.
- malux85 2y agoThis is exactly it. I left Google in 2013 after working there for 3 years because I could see this happening. I only imagine how much worse it is now.
- bfrog 2y agoFrankly I hope this pops the AI bubble back to reality. We don't really need a 500B investment in AI. We do need a 500B investment in cleaning up our emissions. Something AI would only make worse.
- ablation 2y agoIt didn’t pop it two years ago when it was published/leaked. In fact since then the bubble has only swelled faster.
- dragonwriter 2y agoDeepSeek has recently provided a more concrete demonstration of what this paper laid out in principle, which could impact things.
- pjc50 2y agoBut nobody is going to make monopoly profits from reducing emissions. It just costs money. Things that benefit everyone don't get nearly as much effort as things that benefit a single billionaire.
- bfrog 2y agoRight, that would require social endeavors to solve social problems instead of targeting the next quarter yacht money
- uxcolumbo 2y agoWhy is this being downvoted? Fighting global warming and investing in clean tech is more important than funding ClosedAI and friends and making hyperteers and enshittificationers even richer than they already are.
- konaraddi 2y agoFor consumers, i think we could see local first AI boxes (possibly just our phones) + subscription based plan to integrate with set of API providers for info and actions with paid add-ons and updates. The moat might be integration or deals with a set of “atomic”/foundational API providers to invoke results (without a [headless] browser). E.g. book a flight will be thru APIs from airlines partnering with consumer AI box companies with some “best pricing” layer on top so user can book optimal flights, user can generate high quality infinite doomscrolling content on demand, provided by TikTok with ad and ad-free tiers. Law enforcement will crack down on unregistered, “dark” boxes and require API providers to talk with registered boxes only so dark boxes will have to rely on shady, limited APIs.
- AznHisoka 2y agoHot take but 99% of all profitable businesses have no moat, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can still make lots of $$$. Moats matter the most to investors and maybe the C suite. For everyone else, it’s just an intellectual exercise
- foolswisdom 2y agoIt matters to the companies whose business model is to make money because they have moat.
- amunozo 2y agoNot only there's nothing wrong, but it is a good thing.
- fairity 2y ago> Hot take but 99% of all profitable businesses have no moat, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can still make lots of $$$. Can you make $157b without a moat? Or, anything close to that? That's the more relevant question at hand.
- mrkramer 2y agoGoogle has hell of a moat because they are continuously crawling and indexing the Web for the last 27 years. They have tons of data and information that can be used for training of their AI.
- AznHisoka 2y agoIncreasing amounts of data is also becoming hidden behind walled gardens like LinkedIn, Instagram and Slack/group chats.
- polygon87 2y agoLinkedIn at least shows up prominently in Google search results, not sure about IG. And Google still has some majored walled gardens of its own like Docs, Gmail, and YouTube.
- AznHisoka 2y agoGoogle picks up some LinkedIn content, but I would venture it’s a very small slice of what is out there. Just doing a google search for several posts I see on my feed, and very few if any shows up. Same for IG (which makes sense as a lot of profiles are private)
- maeil 2y agoI wouldn't be surprised if LinkedIn is eventually excluded from training datasets. It's inclusion trains the LLMs to generate slop, which the providers will eventually be looking to reduce.
- BoredPositron 2y agoI tested 1000 AI tools in one day…
- maeil 2y agoAnd here are 3 things I learned.
- socrateslee 2y agoThe VCs thinked that the scaling law may build a moat for very large computing powers like Google and OpenAI, and VCs rushed into the area the foundation models. The emerging of DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1 somehow make the moat vulnerable with their much smaller training cost. The fact verified the claim of Google.